the people getting ripped off

I'll tip my hat to the next constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray --
We don't get fooled again


-- The Who





________________________




Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas; Mean Streets; The Last Waltz) made a documentary about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home.  In it, a wonderful man named Izzy Young is interviewed -- in NYC, he runs the Folklore Center, or something...he tells the interviewer that back in the early '60s Dylan gave some wild stories about what he'd done and where he'd been.  (Minneapolis, [true]; South Dakota [maybe true]; Gallup, New Mexico [not so much], etc. ...)


Young reads aloud from his own journals -- notebooks on his lap, in a room of books and records...notes he'd made from his conversations with Robert Zimmerman / Bob Dylan, "back in the day." 


Mr. Young's New York accent bubbles simultaneously with big-city skepticism and wonder, as he reads.  'This place, that place, those states, worked as a ranch hand, a cowboy,' etc. etc. 


Izzy Young looks up from the old notebooks and tells the interviewer, "I should have known -- he was bullshitting me.  I was taken in, and I don't mind; I'm proud of it -- because he wrote terrific songs.  I didn't care what he was telling me..."











Back then, Dylan was finding his identity as a person and as a musical explorer and artist.  In Scorsese's film, Dylan comments about his early personal myth-making, saying, "It didn't matter to me what I said."  And, after a slight pause, "Still doesn't, really."


I have to recall these quotations when I contemplate Candidate Trump ("Citizen Trump," like "Citizen Kane"??)














------------------------------- "It didn't matter to me what I said."


______________________________


When we think about words and statements being meaningless, or "not mattering" we can transfer that idea over to advertising.  Do we believe ads?  Do we believe what they say?  Is that where we "get our information"?


The Becoming Minimalist blogger wrote about the 2016 Super Bowl ads, and the "promises" they make which they cannot possibly "keep."


One Reader typed in a Comment, calling the blogger "a curmudgeon" and saying, You take the ads too seriously; don't worry, no one believes them.


Another Comment replied, Advertisers would not spend millions on the ads if they did not work.


(Per usual, Reb Tevye nods and sighs, "You are right.  And you are right.  And you also are right"...)





("...all day long I'd bidi-bidi-bum, if I were a wealthy man!")




A February 9, 2016 Commenter at Becoming Minimalist said,


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hey Chuck, not for nothing, but I am *the* target demographic for the Quicken/Rocket ad:  the upper end of the millennial generation in age, stable employment, and I have some assets.  The absolute garbage message of that ad is easy for me to encapsulate:  it's the classic "get on the bandwagon!" ad.  The problem:  the bandwagon is moving 100 mph into a brick wall.


What do I mean?  After *just* clearing their balance sheets of delinquencies -- through foreclosures, short sales, and the outright fire sales to the REIT's -- the banks are finally back in the mood to make loans.




~  In the leadup to the last recession, the people getting ripped off were the working poor Gen X'ers and Boomers who needed homes as shelter for families, but who were severely upsold into more house than they could afford. 


The tactics were artificially cheap teaser rates as well as propaganda about homes being an "asset." 


That demographic has been gouged so severely, they won't come back to the kind of usurious mortgages they were offered pre-Recession.




~  So now the targets are middle class millennials, and it's easy to see the sort of desperate tactics the finance industry is willing to use.  First, there's the soft sell:  a billion and one think pieces talking about how millennials aren't settling down, having kids, and buying homes. 


Just look at the so-called "experts" that are quoted:  half of them come right out of the same banks who were defrauding Boomers and Gen X'ers only a couple years ago.  The other half are the court astrologers who do business as marketing consultants.




But now, with these ads, you see the hard sell.  It's aimed squarely at taking money millennials really ought to be using to create emergency funds and early retirement savings, so that they don't spend the inevitable *next* Recession in even worse shape. 


Instead, the banks want them shoving that money into 15 and 30 year long mortgages (and the required down payments).




Is that because home ownership is so important?  Or perhaps it's really because there's a *lot* more money for banks and brokers to either originate or service mortgages than there is in being the lowly custodian/fiduciary of a retirement fund.




~  So in essence, the bank and broker cartel's pitch is, "get a mortgage, you lazy selfie-taking millennials! 


We don't care if your parents are looking forward to cat food retirements because of ARM balloon payments, BUY BUY BUY.  We don't care if you're still paying student loans (or worse, looking forward to the bomb of Income Based Repayment tax burdens)! 


MORGAGE MORTGAGE MORTGAGE. 


And while you're at it,


BUY BUY BUY


stand mixers and exotic looking furniture (with even *more* usurious consumer loans and store credit)!  And if you care about your future, you're a goddamned COMMIE who won't make AMERICA GREAT AGAIN."


And really, who needs that?  Not me.  And not America.




------------------------------
Elizabeth Commented, Feb. 13, 2016 at 7:42 a.m.,
Wow, very well said.  Perfectly on point.


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